Alcohol abuse, typically characterized as a maladaptive pattern of alcohol use, leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, is a serious medical and social problem. It has been suggested that agents producing a selective decrease in alcohol 10 drinking in animals, without producing a parallel decrease in water or food intake, are likely to be clinically effective in the treatment of human alcoholism (Myers 1994). Daidzin, the active ingredient of the Chinese herb Radix pureariea (RP), used as a traditional treatment for “alcohol addiction” in China, fits the profile: it decreases alcohol drinking in the golden hamster, without producing a decrease in water or food intake 15 (Keung and Vallee3 1993). In contrast, many drugs, including specific serotonergic agonist (e.g., sertraline) and opiate antagonists (e.g., naloxone and naltrexone), that have been shown to inhibit alcohol consumption in animals have also impaired water or food consumption at the same time (Myers 1994).
There remains a need to provide an effective treatment for substance abuse and/or addiction, more particularly abuse of and/or addiction to particularly alcohol, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, ketamine, Ecstasy, nicotine, oxycontin/oxycodone, codeine, morphine, and the like.